We heard about these fire camps from Lizzie Johnson. She’s a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle and spends most of the year chasing fires around California.

We send one of the youngest people on our staff, 26-year-old Noor Gill, to report on a 25-year-old whose job took over her life earlier this year.

Producer Dana Chivvis explores the case of a 66-year-old working lifeguard who is suing New York State for age discrimination after refusing to wear a Speedo on the job.

Benjamen Walker of the podcast Theory of Everything tells guest host Sean Cole about an Uber drivers strike he came across in Kenya. The guys who didn’t join the strike and kept driving for Uber made extra money since there were fewer cars on the road.

Los Angeles Times reporter Molly O’Toole talks to U.S. asylum officers—the people who end up sending migrants back to Mexico.

The first day on the job inevitably means mistakes, mishaps, and sometimes, fiascos. A true story, told by a former rookie cop.

Ira talks to his dad about a job he had before Ira was born.

Reporter Nancy Updike spends two days with Neal Smither, who cleans up crime scenes for a living, and comes away wanting to open his Los Angeles franchise, despite the gore — or maybe because of it.

Ira Glass and Kelefa Sanneh talk about Starbucks’ racial bias training program, which Kalefa recently discussed with Howard Schultz.

A story about polygraph operator Doug Williams, created by the podcast Love + Radio, that’ll be part of their upcoming season. Produced by Jacob McClelland, Ana Adlerstein, Steven Jackson and Nick van der Kolk.

Mohammed Aden was just a regular Minnesotan dad who unwittingly became governor of a region in Somalia. As governor, one of his main goals was to eliminate piracy.

Our producer David Kestenbaum spoke with some people who are in the grand gesture business: skywriters.

Reporter Sam Black visited factory workers in Indiana to see how they were feeling.

Wendy Whelan was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet until 2014. She explains an undesirable side of having an incredible talent.

A lawyer with almost no experience in criminal law is assigned to a criminal case with a sentence of 20 years to life. This happened because, in Louisiana, like in a few states, public defenders’ offices are so short-staffed that courts are ordering private attorneys to take pro bono clients.

In New York, like in lots of cities, you can call 3-1-1 for help with city services, but there's lots of things that people call in for that operators don't have answers for. And so they improvise.

Seth Freed Wessler reports on people going the opposite direction over the US/Mexico border. Each year hundreds of thousands of people are deported from the US to Mexico — tens of thousands more choose to leave on their own — and lots of them make the journey after years and years living in the states.

We hear from the people in the land of the non-working: Fred Beaton on hislast shift driving a shuttle bus at Logan Airport before he retires; LincCohen and Sandi Weisenberg talk about what chores get done once retirementbegins; and Angela Jane Evancie tries to get her boyfriend, Morgan Peach, tostop relaxing quite so much.

There are so few farmers in the United States that in 1993, the census stopped counting the number of Americans who live on farms at the time. But in China, despite the vast migration to cities in recent years, more than half the country still lives in rural areas.

Ira plays tape of a man whose job is plowing snow. He'll plow your driveway for money...or, if you're extra nice, he'll do it for free without even mentioning it.

Some adventures you seek out on purpose, and others hunt you down. Producer Alex Blumberg tells this story, about the experience a guy had in China...which started out as first kind of adventure, then quickly turned into the second kind.

Ira with former baseball player Bobby Morris, on leaving baseball.

Marian Fontana, whose husband was a firefighter who died on 9/11, originally appeared on our show in 2005. Ira talks with Marian today, about what has changed for her over the last 10 years.